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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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Page 22
10. Fundamentalisms then become potentially or actually aggressive. Many newcomers to the scene of reportage equate fundamentalisms with belligerence and militancy, with terrorism or revolution, with shooting and killing or with massive efforts to take over a polity, as through constitutional amendment in a republic. Yet fundamentalist movements may long satisfy people with private interests, who may wish to be left alone, as if sectarian; they want to be free to bring up their children in their pattern, as nonfundamentalist traditionalists like the Amish or the Doukhobors choose to do.
Yet there must be a potential, if the people are agents of God or of a transcendent philosophy or force, for them to erupt from passivity into activity. Given the stakes, the scale of challenges, and the instruments of change made possible in a technological era, the move toward activism and aggression may be quite rapid. The first movementthe politics of withdrawalthen characteristically changes into a politics of resentment. Fundamentalists resent being left out, deprived, displaced, scorned, marginalized. They feel their cultures penetrated. They must take action against the infidel. There is almost always a polity implication, whether constitutional, revolutionary, or designed to stabilize a hegemony of fundamentalists.
11. Finally, the comparativist looks for and, so far as I know, finds what we might call encompassing, substantive philosophies of history in fundamentalisms. They deal with the future as if it had already occurred, measuring history and their actions from such futures. This means that they are, in many religious traditions, messianic and millennial. They may act in the name of the assured revolution of the proletariat which produces a classless society, or a coming Golden Age or Paradise, or the Second Coming of Jesus. It is possible that the philosophy of history could be progressive, but the more common pattern is for apocalyptic, dramatic upheavals in the course of events.
Such a philosophy of history for the group and the individual permits one to live with setback and postponement. While fundamentalisms are multiclass phenomenathe recent ones in America took off in middle-class cultures, and not just among the pooroften they give solace and meaning to the deprived. The future is assured, the past was grand, the present may be cloudy. Yet the philosophy of
 
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history grants to insiders enough knowledge about and motivation from a specific future and discernible past to help members follow prescriptive paths and actions in the present.
When they look thus, believe thus, live thus, and hope thus, observers call them fundamentalist, and most have cognate or analogous terms to describe themselves. They have become major contenders on the world scene late in the twentieth century, in a time when progressives thought they would all have been fossilized or would simply have disappeared. They merit study both comparatively, for what they hold in common, and in their singularity.
 
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2
American Fundamentalism to the 1950s: A Guide, for New Yorkers
Leo P. Ribuffo
Unlike other great cities, New York is not usually associated with fundamentalism. Walking through downtown Chicago, we can easily encounter the Moody Bible Institute, whose founder, Dwight L. Moody, emerged as the nation's foremost evangelist in the 1870s and built a religious infrastructure later used by fundamentalists. Chicago is also home to the Pacific Garden Mission, where Billy Sunday, Moody's successor as the premier American evangelist, returned to Christ in 1886. And Los Angeles houses the Angelus Temple, where the great, gorgeous Pentecostal preacher, Aimee Semple McPherson, held forth from the 1920s until her death in 1944.
The absence of comparable landmarks in New York City reflects the relative weakness of the fundamentalist movement there. Yet, paradoxically, New York has played a decisive role in the
interpretation
of fundamentalism. Indeed, three CCNY alumniDaniel Bell, '38, Seymour Martin Lipset, '43, and Nathan Glazer, '44offered an explanation of fundamentalism that survived virtually unchallenged among social scientists from the mid-1950s until the late 1970s. According to Bell, Lipset, and Glazer, fundamentalism was best understood as a social movement led by provincials whose penchant for far-fetched conspiracy theories rose as their status declined. Although this pluralist theory contains several grains of truth, those
 
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granules are now usually diluted in popularizations by journalists or polemical mailings from People for the American Way. Moreover, even sophisticated versionspresented, for example, in Bell's famous anthology,
The New American Right
(first published in 1955, then revised and reissued as
The Radical Right
in 1963)are problematical products of a venerable cultural conflict between cosmopolitan intellectuals and theologically conservative Protestants. In the 1990s, still, neither side understands the other very well.
In this chapter, an attempt to maximize understanding, I will consider aspects of theologically conservative Protestantism from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s, when this broad religious movement underwent an important transition. We will see that New York City, though lacking in fundamentalist landmarks, did house some fundamentalist activists, many targets of fundamentalist ire, and even a few empathic cosmopolitans who tried to make sense of that anger.
Most thoughtful Americans probably know that a hundred years ago our country was overwhelmingly Protestant. What needs emphasis, however, is the degree to which an evangelical Protestant ethos pervaded the cultural elite and, to a lesser but large extent, affected everyday life. Of course all American Protestants were not alike. Their faith had been marked by schism and internecine persecution from the outset; Mormons could attest that neither had ceased by the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, especially after the Civil War settled the central issue of slavery, there was sufficient agreement among major denominations to make possible an evangelical coalition promoting piety, diligence, temperance, and patriotism, traits often presented as characteristically if not exclusively Protestant. Catholics and Jews represented significant minorities, enjoyed equality before the law, and sometimes rose to positions of power, nonetheless, their faiths definitely were affected by the prevailing ethos. As Professor Glazer has suggested, a merger between Reform Judaism and modernist Protestantism would not have been inconceivable a hundred years ago. And the American Catholic hierarchy, skeptical of papal infallibility and ostentatiously devoted to the Constitution, was more tolerant than most of its European counterparts.
In 1876 leading Protestants would have agreed with Rev. Henry
 
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Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, who declared during a celebration of the nation's centennial that Americans were now richer, wiser, and more devout than ever before. To Beecher and millions of his fellow citizens, the Union victory in the Civil War proved that God had tested but ultimately blessed America. During the next quarter century, even the smuggest American (and Beecher was surely a contender for the title) had reason to wonder about God's purposes, let alone His nationality. Shrewd entrepreneurs created an impressive industrial plant, managed financially potent oligopolies, and attracted cheap labor from the American and European countryside. Yet prosperity trickled down slowly and sometimes collapsed altogether. With good reasonand inflated rhetoricsmall farmers and industrial workers blamed the conspicuously consuming elite for unemployment, injury, and impoverishment. After a deep depression began in 1893, American society faced another great test. To many observers the fall of Rome seemed a truer parallel than Christ's entry into Jerusalem.
Extraordinary as these social changes were, they probably created less anguish among leading Protestants than did the intellectual challenges to casually accepted religious beliefs. That only a minority of Protestant clergy ultimately endorsed a social gospel suggests that it was easier to ignore conspicuously consuming sinners than to ignore proponents of Darwinism and biblical higher criticism. The theory of evolution, widely known by the 1880s, implied that mankind was only slightly superior to apes rather than slightly inferior to angels. Although higher criticismthe study of the Bible in texts as close to the original as possiblewas not so widely disseminated as Darwinism, it was no longer confined to Enlightenment infidels. Bolstered by German and French scholarship, pastors fresh from divinity school could tell their congregations that the Book of Isaiah was written by several people, none of whom was named Isaiah. In other words, higher criticism undermined faith in the Bible as God's word
in any simple sense
. If pastors tended to discuss these twin challenges gingerly after wrestling with their own doubts, Robert G. Ingersoll and his fellow militant agnostics bluntly told surprisingly large audiences that religion was an unscientific delusion.
These challenges produced a split within Protestantism that ultimately widened into a chasm. Theological liberals adapted to intel-
 
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lectual modernity. Accepting higher criticism, they were skeptical of Old Testament history and New Testament miracles. The "days" of creation in Genesis might have stood for millions of years of evolution; perhaps Jesus himself was only an admirable mortal rather than God's divine son. Similarly, biblical references to the coming kingdom of God could be read as admonitions to build a good society here and now rather than as predictions of Jesus' eventual return. Forsaking the notion of original sin, most liberals believed that mankind was moral enough to create a good society. Finally, though theological liberals were not so oblivious to evil as fundamentalist and neo-orthodox critics maintained, they generally embraced the prevailing idea of progress.
In all essentials, theological conservatism was the opposite of theological liberalism. The Bible, perhaps marred by mistranslation, nonetheless remained God's word, "inerrant" in the original texts and accessible to all. God's son, Jesus, died to atone for humanity's sins. God's kingdom was no metaphor for protective tariffs or social work; rather it was a sinless world to be established after Jesus' Second Coming. Contemporary men and women, as sinful as Adam and Eve, could not make this world substantially better. Indeed, theological conservatives expected conditions to worsen until Jesus returned.
The gross differences are unmistakable. Yet especially because theological conservatives are so often misunderstood, we must appreciate some of the shadings. For example, theological liberals were not necessarily political liberals. An unsympathetic Henry Ward Beecher told striking railroad workers in 1877 that they could support their families on one dollar per day, a sum sufficient to buy bread and water. On the other hand, as the career of William Jennings Bryan demonstrates, theological conservatives were not necessarily political conservatives. Theological liberals differed among themselves in matters of doctrine as well as social policy, with many continuing to accept some biblical miracles and Jesus' divinity. Theological conservatives, were more diverse than their liberal rivals in background and belief. Their ranks included urbane Calvinists, traveling evangelists, and grassroots participants who believed that conversion brought a "second blessing," including the power to heal and the gift of glos-
 
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solalia. Veterans of this turn-of-the-century holiness revival, usually poor and demonstrative, formed Pentecostal churches, generally shunned by more polished theological conservatives.
Some theological conservatives accepted an interpretation of Scripture called premillennial dispensationalism. According to this framework, which is anything but simple literalism, history was divided into erasdispensationsin which mankind made and then broke covenants with God. Humanity now lived in the penultimate period to be marked by another broken covenant, the rise of Satan's helper, the Antichrist, a great Tribulation testing all Christians, and finally Jesus' return. Dispensationalists found in Scripture prophecies of current events and they studied world affairs for evidence of the impending Second Coming; before his ignominious departure from Paris, Napoleon III looked like the most promising candidate for Antichrist. Scholars still disagree about the prevalence of dispensationalism among theological conservatives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet its long-term significance cannot be denied. In the 1980s, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Hal Lindsey proffered dispensationalist interpretations of contemporary events to millions of Americans.
By 1900, theological liberals had captured most of the major seminaries, pulpits, and publications. As controversies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City show, this institutional dominance was not easily achieved. Founded by Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Union became fully independent and interdenominational after liberal Professor Charles Briggs was charged with heresy and barred from the ministry by Presbyterian conservatives. The two camps continued to jockey for position within Protestantism during the Progressive era. Conservatives found new leaders, including the staid Baptist, William Bell Riley of Minneapolis; issued the
Schofield Reference Bible,
which brought dispensationalist exegesis to a mass audience; and effectively argued their case in
The Fundamentals,
a series of booklets that reached at least three million readers. Both sides increasingly considered denominational differences less significant than the cross-denominational split between theological liberals and conservatives. During the Progressive era, however, the split was not yet a chasm. Liberals and conservatives sometimes
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